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• Indiana University’s Kelley School has identified six steps that encourage faculty to master new technology, share best practices, and develop cutting-edge courses.
• The Kelley School seeks input from a wide range of instructors, draws inspiration from early adopters, and allows faculty to choose which GenAI tools they’d like to use.
• Tech-savvy faculty join the school’s Department of Advanced Business Technologies, then return to their departments to share ideas with more reluctant colleagues.

 
If you were to ask experts what they consider the most talked-about and relevant topics in teaching and pedagogy these days, generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) would rank near the top of almost everyone’s list. Without doubt, we in higher education must adjust our course offerings to prepare students for proficiency in GenAI—not to mention other yet-to-be-imagined new technologies that will surely emerge.

Previous technological innovations, such as electronic spreadsheets, mostly impacted quantitative courses such as statistics or finance. In contrast, GenAI affects virtually every discipline—from accounting to zoology—and in deep and distinctive ways.

Currently, most schools offer siloed, stand-alone courses on GenAI, or else they focus on how professors can make one-off adjustments in each of their individual classrooms. But those approaches simply won’t keep our institutions at the forefront of necessary pedagogical and curricular change.

To ensure that our programs retain market relevance—and to turn out students who will be effective, creative, responsible, and ethical users of artificial intelligence—business schools must infuse GenAI throughout the entire curriculum. And to do that, we must ensure that our faculty know how to leverage emerging technologies so they can deliver cutting-edge courses.

How can we best encourage faculty members to take on the monumental task of mastering new technology? How can we convince widely diverse instructors—teaching myriad topics—to share best practices among themselves, align their goals, and offer the most cutting-edge courses that complement and build upon each other? Just as important, how can we cultivate in them a sense of ownership of the process?

Recognizing the Obstacles

Answering those questions requires administrators to recognize and deal with several fundamental challenges.

For starters, revising the materials and approaches for each class takes a great deal of time and energy—and because GenAI is constantly evolving, instructors must update their content and teaching styles much more frequently. This places a heavy burden on faculty, many of whom would prefer to repeat what and how they’ve taught successfully in the past.

At the same time, each professor will have a different level of ease and familiarity with technology. This means it will be harder for those in certain fields, or from certain backgrounds, to embed technology-enhanced content into their classes.

To infuse GenAI throughout the curriculum, we must ensure that our faculty know how to leverage emerging technologies so they can deliver cutting-edge courses.

Moreover, given the idiosyncratic demands of different disciplines, no single approach will be effective in integrating these new technologies into the instructional model. This variability presents significant challenges when schools want to introduce needed change across the entire curriculum.

After grappling with these potential roadblocks at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business in Bloomington, where I serve as dean, we have taken six steps that helped us overcome these obstacles and promote necessary change. I offer them here as suggestions for other school administrators.

1. Take a Bottom-Up Approach

As an administrator, I’ve learned not to be too prescriptive when it comes to promoting the adoption of new technology. Since GenAI plays out in different ways in each field, issuing fiats from the top is far less productive than encouraging input and ideas from a wide range of faculty members who are on the front lines of instruction.

Each faculty member has different needs, goals, and competencies, so for me to dictate what should happen would simply be hubris. And even when I come up with a good idea, the instructors must operationalize it. Success is more likely when the concepts, recommendations, and implementation come from the grassroots and are shared on a peer-to-peer basis.

2. Identify Early Adopters

Most departments in our institutions and schools will contain a subset of individuals who lean into new technologies and have already demonstrated a commitment to infusing them into their classes.

We conducted a comprehensive survey to determine who those instructors are at the Kelley School and to capture their best practices. We wanted to inventory how faculty members are currently using and teaching GenAI, what their goals are for the future, and how we can help them achieve those goals. The survey results strikingly illustrated how aggressively some faculty are adopting emerging technologies and how many different approaches they are taking to integrate these technologies into their instruction.

3. Provide Faculty With the Necessary Tools

Many GenAI-enhanced products already are available for professors, and more are coming out each day. At the Kelley School, we focus on providing innovative and helpful tools for faculty members to implement in ways they find most beneficial to their students. We trust that adoption will be higher when faculty have agency over their own AI decisions.

Thus, rather than prescribe specific GenAI tools, we’ve given our faculty access to multiple ones. Faculty can use institution-supported options such as our enterprise license for Microsoft CoPilot, or they can use the funding we provide to purchase additional products at their own discretion.

We’re also developing our own tools. For example, we’re currently involved in a pilot program for KelleyGPT, which is our specific implementation of , an open-source large language model.

4. Encourage Sharing Among Others

The next step is to establish a way that those early adopters can communicate and share best practices with each other. Unfortunately, at most universities, academic departments tend to operate in silos, which is a natural byproduct of subject-matter specialization, methodological and topical research approaches, and professional affiliations.

To sow the seeds for cross-disciplinary collaboration among the academic departments at the Kelley School, we’ve created a virtual . This knowledge-sharing hub is designed to establish best practices that can be disseminated across the school. With 68 members, it is as large as any of our traditional departments, and it spans all of our functional academic areas.

To sow the seeds for cross-disciplinary collaboration, we’ve created a knowledge-sharing hub designed to establish best practices that can be disseminated across the school.

Faculty must apply to join. They also must demonstrate enthusiasm about using emerging technologies as well as interest in developing new ones. In weekly Zoom meetings, department members provide updates on topics such as KellyGPT, discuss how to support faculty research, and share the ways that staff and faculty are using technology to gain efficiency and revise educational materials.

While participating faculty are still members of their traditional academic departments, their affiliation with this new group enables them to work together to share discipline-specific insights. It also encourages a borrow-and-transfer approach to distributing GenAI best practices throughout our organization.

5. Motivate Reluctant Participants

When faculty members who are involved in the knowledge-sharing hub return to their individual departments, they can spread the word about new developments. Their enthusiasm often provides inspiration for faculty who are reluctant adopters of technology. The fact is, people don’t want to be left behind, and once they know what’s possible, they are motivated to adopt best practices in their classrooms and improve their own teaching.

We’ve supplemented this organic approach with more formal events such as panels and hands-on workshops. These sessions have covered topics such as how to teach AI skills to students, how to use AI as an aid in teaching, and how to apply AI in scholarly research. During these events, faculty also share their struggles with GenAI and detail the best practices they have adopted.

6. Replicate and Evaluate

For the future, our goal is to work with our internal policy committees and revise our student learning outcomes to include documented objectives for GenAI. Our plan is to highlight what’s working and replicate it more broadly throughout the curriculum. Rather than keeping emerging technologies to a single course or department, we want to embed them in all courses.

In the next year or so, we also plan to incentivize progress by including GenAI-related benchmarks in each professor’s annual performance evaluation. While exact details are still being finalized, we are considering new AI-specific metrics in pedagogical development and delivery. We’ll consider how faculty are improving their own proficiency and how they are teaching their students to use GenAI.

For example, we plan to ask faculty to demonstrate how they’ve incorporated GenAI and other advanced business technologies into their courses. By documenting student learning outcomes, we will be better able to measure this element.

Preparing for Continual Change

As we stand here today, we can’t predict exactly how GenAI is going to change higher education in the coming years or what other new technologies will emerge that will require us to revise how we educate our students.

However, we know we must prepare our structures and processes for continual change. That means we must encourage bottom-up participation, urge those on the forefront to share ideas among themselves and with others, motivate and support those who are more reluctant to adopt new technologies, and regularly evaluate faculty members’ progress in technology-related areas.

If we take these steps, we will have a much better chance of successfully dealing with any new technological advances that come our way.